The appearance in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, came a day after Stone was indicted on seven criminal counts as part of Mueller’s ongoing investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.

Before dawn Friday, Stone was arrested by a cadre of FBI agents at his Florida home. He was reportedly then taken to the Broward County courthouse for an 11 a.m. hearing before Judge Lurana Snow.

Watch exclusive CNN footage of the FBI arresting longtime Trump associate Roger Stone. Stone has been indicted by a grand jury on charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. https://cnn.it/2FZxnjd

Stone was charged with five counts of making false statements, one count of obstructing another probe of Russian interference conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, and one count of witness tampering.

The 24-page indictment alleges that Stone had contacted, and had been contacted by, an array of Trump campaign associates about leaking Democratic officials’ stolen information on the eve of the 2016 election to sway the contest against Hillary Clinton.

The organization that coordinated the document-dumping campaign is unnamed in the indictment but clearly refers to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. That whistleblowing site dumped tranches of emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign John Podesta that were allegedly hacked by Russian operatives.

Stone has repeatedly denied colluding with Russia. His lawyer, Grant Smith, told NBC News on Friday that if the special counsel had “found any collusion, they would have charged him with it.”

Manafort’s hearing relates to Mueller’s allegation that the Republican operative repeatedly lied in breach of his plea deal with the special counsel. Manafort had pleaded guilty to multiple crimes related to his work for pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine.

“This has nothing to do with the president,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of Stone’s indictment Friday morning. “The president did nothing wrong. There was no collusion on his part.”

He will remain on “leave” until spring, when he can officially retire from the FBI.

Update: According to Fox News, McCabe was “removed.” A source told the news outlet that this was the earliest date possible for the FBI to remove him and still leave him fully eligible for his pension. A CNN reporter has also shared this version of events.

McCabe’s departure has been expected for months. ABC News reported last year that McCabe planned to retire in March 2018, when he becomes fully eligible for pension benefits.

News of McCabe’s retirement comes the day the House intelligence committee is expected to vote on releasing a classified memo that details alleged FBI abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in investigating the 2016 campaign of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The memo is expected to say that FBI officials obtained a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Democrats and the FBI have been fighting the release of the memo, saying it would be “reckless” to do so.

McCabe has come under scrutiny from congressional Republicans, who have questioned why he only recused himself from the Clinton email investigation a week before the election when his wife had received hundreds of thousands in campaign donations from a close Hillary Clinton ally.

McCabe was appointed FBI Deputy Director in 2016 by former President Obama, and became acting director in May 2016, after President Trump fired James Comey.

Special counsel Robert Mueller may have helped cover up connections between a Saudi family and the 9/11 terror attacks, according to Tuesday report from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

Court documents obtained by Judicial Watch show that as FBI director, Mueller was “likely involved” in releasing deceptive agency statements to cover up a connection between a Saudi Arabian family living in Florida and the 9/11 hijackers. The statements were tailored to discredit a 2011 story exposing an FBI investigation into the family, who lived in Sarasota, Fla. The investigation was also withheld from Congress, according to Judicial Watch.

The FBI investigation into the Saudis came when news stories found that they had abruptly left the country two weeks before 9/11, reportedly leaving behind their cars, furniture, clothes, and other personal items.

“Though the recently filed court documents reveal Mueller received a briefing about the Sarasota Saudi investigation, the FBI continued to publicly deny it existed and it appears that the lies were approved by Mueller,” Judicial Watch wrote. “Not surprisingly, he didn’t respond to questions about this new discovery emailed to his office by the news organization that uncovered it.”

Some republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump have been clamoring for him to fire Mueller in recent months as they perceive his credibility to be waning. They cite that more than half of Mueller’s team has worked for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or the Clinton Foundation or have a history of donating to Democrats.

Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit in early December demanding that Mueller release hundreds of anti-Trump text messages exchanged by FBI agent Peter Strzok – who was on Mueller’s Russia investigation team – and FBI lawyer Lisa Page throughout 2017. Now, with some of the messages released, it’s become clearthat Strzok may have thought the investigation was a dead end.

President Trump in an interview on Thursday called the senior Federal Bureau of Investigation official who texted his lover about an insurance policy in the case of Trump’s election “treasonous.”

“A man is tweeting to his lover that if [Democrat Hillary Clinton] loses, we’ll essentially do the insurance policy. We’ll go to phase two and we’ll get this guy out of office,” Trump said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

“This is the FBI we’re talking about—that is treason,” he added. “That is a treasonous act. What he tweeted to his lover is a treasonous act.”

The official, Peter Strzok, had major roles in the Clinton email investigation and the FBI’s initial investigation into Russian meddling and potential Trump campaign collusion, and had been assigned to the subsequent special counsel team until the text messages were discovered and he was removed.

The Justice Department inspector general, who is conducting an investigation into whether there was political bias in the FBI’s handling of the Clinton and Russia probes, discovered the text messages Strzok had sent to his lover, an FBI lawyer with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

The two last year during the 2016 presidential campaign season exchanged thousands of text messages that revealed they supported Clinton and detested Trump and had discussed an “insurance policy” in the case of his election.

Strzok texted to Page in August 2016: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration…that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

“People familiar with” Strzok’s text told the WSJ he meant the FBI had to aggressively investigate allegations of collusion, and that it was not intended to suggest a secret plan to harm his candidacy.

Strzok was the lead agent on the Clinton email investigation and had watered down language in a statement exonerating Clinton that might have had criminal implications for her.

Trump also said the U.S. is taking steps to ensure Russia and other countries do not try to influence future elections.

“We’re going to be very, very careful about Russia and about anybody else, by the way,” Trump told the paper.

He said his administration is working on different solutions and “all sorts of fail-safes.”

He also flatly denied any collusion with Russia, and said since there was no collusion crime, prosecutors were trying to say he obstructed justice for firing FBI Director James Comey.

“Of course there was no obstruction — there was no crime,” he said. “They make up a crime, and the crime doesn’t exist, and then they say obstruction.”

He said, rather, he should get credit for firing Comey, saying “everybody wanted Comey fired.”

“I should be given credit for having great insight,” he said.

Comey’s firing led to the special counsel probe, and for Democrats to argue that Trump obstructed justice by trying to fire Comey and squelch the FBI’s investigation.

A recent book, Fire and Fury, alleged that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s son-in-law and daughter, insisted that he fire Comey and that “cosmopolitans” would welcome it, too.

Trump said his lawyers’ initial instinct was to fight the special counsel, but then after reviewing requested documents, decided to be open.

“They said, ‘You never did anything wrong,’” he said. “To be honest, they probably were surprised, as most lawyers would be.”

Mueller has told Trump’s lawyers that he may want to speak with the president in the near future, but Trump on Thursday would not commit to anything.

He said he hoped that investigations in Congress were nearing an end, and that Republicans would be strong and take charge.

Trump addressed former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s remarks that a meeting his son Donald Trump Jr. took with Russians was “treasonous,” although Bannon later said his comments were directed to his then-campaign manager Paul Manafort.

This damn government is so damn corrupt that it is not possible to have a proper investigation. How is it possible that no one is being indicted and locked up. This video proves the FBI and the DOJ is corrupt all the way up to Barack Obama.

The Duran reported back in October that one Trump hating Republican was a driving force behind the fake Trump dossier…that RINO, Anti-Trumper was and is Senator John McCain.

It has since been confirmed that McCain did deliver the infamous Trump Dossier to the FBI.

John McCain has never hidden his hatred for Donald Trump, going to outrageous lengths to derail Trump’s presidency.

It seems that the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign took over in April 2016 from a previous unnamed Republican the funding of the ‘research’ which resulted in the Trump Dossier (the Washington rumour mill says this Republican was Senator McCain).

According to The Duran’s Alexander Mercouris, it certainly look like the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign circulated the Trump Dossier to their friends in the media and in the US intelligence community, triggering the start of the FBI investigation in July 2016 and the decision in August 2016 by the CIA to report its contents to President Obama. It was those two actions taken together which were the starting point of the Russiagate scandal.

It appears that the US Congress is starting to catch on to McCain’s treasonous antics to sabotage Trump’s presidency, and flame the war fires against Russia. Via Zerohedge…

Several months ago it emerged that the Republican sponsor behind the Fusion GPS Trump project was hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, a fact which surprised many who expected that John McCain would be the GOP mastermind looking for dirt in Trump’s past. However, a new and credible McCain trail has emerged in the annals of the “Trump Dossier” after the Washington Examiner reported that the House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena to an associate of John McCain over his connection with the salacious dossier containing unverified allegations about Trump and his ties to Russia, which many speculate served as the illegitimate basis for FISA warrants against the Trump campaign – permitting the NSA to listen in on Trump’s phone calls – and which the president yesterday slammed as “bogus” and a “crooked Hillary pile of garbage.”

In the latest twist, committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) wants to talk to David Kramer, a former State Department official and current senior fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University, about his visit to London in November 2016. During his trip, at McCain’s request Kramer met with the dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele, to view “the pre-election memoranda on a confidential basis,” according to court filings and to receive a briefing and a copy of the Trump dossier. Kramer then returned to the U.S. to give the document to McCain. McCain then took a copy of the dossier to the FBI’s then-director, James Comey. But the FBI already had the document; Steele himself gave the dossier to the bureau in installments, reportedly beginning in early July 2016.

While McCain, recovering in Arizona from treatments for cancer, has long refused to detail his actions regarding the dossier, his associate Kramer was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee on Dec. 19. The new subpoena stems from statements Kramer made in that interview. In the session, the Washington Examiner reports, Kramer told House investigators that he knew the identities of the Russian sources for the allegations in Steele’s dossier. But when investigators pressed Kramer to reveal those names, he declined to do so.

Now, he is under subpoena which was issued Wednesday afternoon, and directs Kramer to appear again before House investigators on Jan. 11.

As the ongoing government probe slowly turns away from Trump’s “collusion” with the Russians and toward the FBI “insurance policy” to allegedly prevent Trump from becoming president by fabricating a narrative of Russian cooperation with the Trump, knowing Steele’s sources will be a critical part of the congressional dossier investigation:

“If one argues the document is unverified and never will be, it is critical to learn the identity of the sources to support that conclusion. If one argues the document is the whole truth, or largely true, knowing sources is equally critical.”

According to Zerohedge, there is another reason to know Steele’s sources, and that is to learn not just the origin of the dossier but its place in the larger Trump-Russia affair.

As the WashEx adds, there is a belief among some congressional investigators that the Russians who provided information to Steele were using Steele to disrupt the American election as much as the Russians who distributed hacked Democratic Party emails. In some investigators’ views, they are the two sides of the Trump-Russia project, both aimed at sowing chaos and discord in the American political system.

Still, investigators who favor this theory ask a sensible question: “It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheing, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America – except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele?”

On the other hand, the theory is still just a theory, for now… and as the Examiner’s Byron York correctly points out, to validate -or refute – it House investigators will seek Steele’s sources – and is why they will try to compel Kramer to talk.